More than half of economists, real estate experts and investment strategists polled by MacroMarkets LLC in Junesaid they now expect national home prices to hit a bottom sometime in 2011 and remain stable through 2015.

Panelists are asked to project the path of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index over the coming five years. Robert Shiller is MacroMarkets’ chief economist and co-founder.

"A significant majority of our panelists believe that the bottom for home prices arrived in the first quarter or will arrive sometime before year-end. Despite persistent macroeconomic uncertainty and unprecedented housing market dysfunction, almost two-thirds of the panelists see the U.S. residential real estate market as at an historic turning point," Shiller said in a statement.